ABSTRACT
On the 7th of November, 1875, the explorer Verney Lovett Cameron arrived, half dead from the effects of scurvy, at the fishing village of Katumbela, a short distance north of Banguela, on the west coast of Africa. Cameron's two surviving companions were bed-ridden with fever, he himself was half blind with ophthalmia, and desertions and local wars were also making further progress impossible. Cameron emerged from his historic march with two convictions. The first was that the Congo basin had considerable economic and commercial potential, and, in particular, that it could be a rich source of minerals. The second conviction was that the area should be opened up by British enterprise and annexed to the British crown. Leopold's reaction was quite the opposite, and there can be no doubt that it was Cameron's journey that stimulated him to make his sustained effort to establish a colony in the Congo Basin.
